In the novel, "Halo: Fall of Reach", Eric Nylund puts the main character, John, through many sacrifices in order to highlight his values and what he deems important in his life in order to provide a deeper understanding of the work as a whole.
Nylund begins by incorporating a scene within the book where John has to watch all of his fellow soldiers be launched out into space as a form of a memorial service. These Soldiers, known as spartans, had passed away due to failures in the augmentations being made to their bodies from the spartan program. During this scene, John as a character opens up about his deeper, more complex emotions to the reader. John had been training with these spartans since he was a young child. They grew up together. They woke up, ate, trained, learned, and slept together. They loved each other like siblings, and for John to have to witness numerous spartans die causes him to open up on a more personal level than the reader has seen thus far. He talks about how seeing his brothers and sisters being launched out into space is essentially like losing apart of himself. The people he cared for and protected were now gone, which emotionally breaks him to a degree that not even John himself has seen before, which illuminates John's values as a character.
Nylund then later shifts to a scene near the end of the book where the planet Reach is being invaded by the alien military force known as the Covenant. John and the rest of his spartans are fighting in hopes of driving off the Covenant army, but soon realise that they are losing and that the planet will soon fall. John is later tasked with evacuating high-value persons off of the planet. As John is about to escape, he listens over his communications as the rest of the spartans are killed off on the planet. The reader is once again exposed to a more emotional side of John, as he begins to describe to the reader the horrific sounds of the spartans he loved being murdered, and how he is once again mentally broken by the whole ordeal. Not only does he have to sit and know that he is losing what was essentially his family, but he now has to listen to it firsthand. His pure and raw emotion that shines through during this segment of the novel reveals to the reader how much John values his 'family', and ultimately illuminates his values as a characters.
In the novel, "Halo: Fall of Reach", Eric Nylund authors a plethora of scenes where sacrifice is present, which illuminates the values of the main character John, and ultimately illustrates how important his fellow soldiers are to him.